Are clients beginning to demand
continuity, even in the face of disruption so severe as to potentially
undermine the continuity of any hosting service, no matter how large?

Even
the biggest clouds aren’t completely safe

If your app is truly decentralised, then even if all
the leading cloud hosting services are down, your app will still be running and
accessible by your clients, because decentralised apps use the Internet itself
as their hosting service and the Internet is far more fault-tolerant than any
hosting service which runs on it.

The
safest cloud is the Internet itself

But if your online service is only designed to run as
a conventional client server-solution, then even if it is being hosted on a
supposedly highly fault-tolerant cloud, it is ultimately dependent upon an
infrastructure which is inherently less reliable than the Internet as a whole
and whose ability to withstand disruption now stands a good chance of being
tested and may well be found wanting.

The
future of IT risk mitigation is decentralisation

The challenge this poses for most enterprises is to
address a requirement to migrate their existing client-server based apps (and
their associated IT infrastructure) to a truly ‘decentralised app’ or DApp
platform, where the perils of exclusive dependence upon any proprietary hosting
services no longer pose an existential risk to their services.

Whilst many organisations have taken their first
tentative steps into the decentralised space by embracing sufficient Blockchain
technology to accommodate Bitcoin and other digital currencies as a means of
payment, the prospect of fully migrating their entire online services to a
decentralised infrastructure using Blockchain may look like being a much more
daunting undertaking.

Nobody
uses IT resilience or operational continuity as a leading argument for
Blockchain projects

In exploring the field of Blockchain migration, I
have yet to encounter any examples of organisations who have taken client
concerns over continuity as a spur for them to implement real decentralisation.

A
global health crisis could move IT continuity to the top of the agenda

Nonetheless, with the current health crisis-based
disruption uppermost in everyone’s mind, giving urgent consideration to crucial
new options that address unprecedented challenges to IT continuity is something
that can no longer be summarily dismissed as being unreasonably paranoid,
excessive, or unrealistic.

A large number of institutions and businesses have
recognised potential opportunities opened up by Blockchain-related benefits
other than resilience. Such high-profile Blockchain benefits include traceability,
transparency, identity protection, authentication, auditability and
disintermediation.

Blockchain
apps are primarily justified on the basis of ‘non-resilience-based benefits’

The inherent resilience conferred by Blockchain’s
decentralised nature, while inevitably included in the business case for a
Blockchain project, is typically relegated to being presented as a highly
valuable but nonetheless subsidiary, incidental and supplemental benefit.

Whether
or not Blockchain is on your agenda, concern over online continuity may now put
it there

It turns out that whilst those other benefits of
Blockchain may, at first sight appear to present the resiliency issue as “just
one benefit among many”, there is now a growing likelihood that continuity
concerns could become a widespread basis for considering decentralised apps as
a high priority risk mitigation strategy, rather than just a fresh opportunity
to improve the quality and range of services.

I’d
love to hear your views on this

Please come and talk to me if you are interested in
anything to do with Blockchain Migration (or any other kind of
decentralisation-based issue). Email peter@comgen.co.uk website http://comgen.co.uk